The Trump administration ramped up its hunt for noncitizens on voter rolls this week as the president continued to claim without evidence that such fraud is widespread and damaging America’s elections. 

But the rapidly expanding campaign by the Department of Homeland Security to track down voter fraud is failing to produce proof that backs up President Donald Trump’s claims that tens of thousands of noncitizens are illegally registered and voting. 

Across the nine states reportedly targeted in the surge, some said they had yet to hear from Homeland Security about any possible voter fraud investigations. Others were subpoenaed this week for voting history on what amounted to a small number of individuals compared to the states’ voting populations. Though more subpoenas could come, they haven’t come close to the tens of thousands of “potential” noncitizens the Trump administration claims to have identified on voter rolls.

On Tuesday, the secretary of state’s office in Georgia, one of the targeted states, received an “Immigration Enforcement Subpoena” requesting information about 13 individuals, according to a copy of the subpoena reviewed by MS NOW and a state election official. 

The subpoena requests an “Individual Voter Report including all voting history and participation and a copy of any available voting documents including identity and/or citizenship documents” for the 13 individuals, “pursuant to a criminal investigation being conducted by the US Immigration & Customs Enforcement, Homeland Security Investigations.” 

In Washington, Border Patrol officers requested similar information for two individuals this week, Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs told MS NOW. 

On Thursday the Wisconsin Elections Commission received subpoenas for roughly 15 individuals, requesting voting history, an election official in the state told MS NOW. The official said the information ultimately shared with DHS in such instances is all publicly available data.

“The small numbers of subpoenas that they’ve issued show that this is not the widespread phenomena they wanted the public to believe it could be,” said Andrea Flores, a former immigration policy adviser and DHS official during the Obama and Biden administrations. “It also should be a sign to Congress that they need to step in and demand information about why this entire investigatory agency is continuing to look for noncitizen voters and not continue their transnational criminal investigations.”

Flores — along with election officials, civil rights advocates and some former DHS officials — has warned that citizens have already been and could continue to be ensnared in the Trump administration’s noncitizen voter hunt, potentially resulting in eligible voters being purged from rolls or prosecutions against citizens helping with voter registration.

Asked about the latest “coordinated criminal voter fraud surge initiative” targeting specific states, which was first reported by CNN, an unnamed DHS spokesperson said “while ICE Homeland Security Investigations is not able to comment on any active investigations, HSI is actively rooting out and investigating election fraud wherever it can be found.” The states where investigations are reportedly ramping up include Washington, Wisconsin, Missouri, Georgia, California, Pennsylvania, Nevada, New York and Connecticut. 

“DHS is laser-focused on prosecuting and removing aliens who vote and preventing the dilution of the votes of U.S. citizens,” the DHS spokesperson told MS NOW.

For years, Trump has made outlandish and baseless claims that noncitizens are to blame for Republican electoral losses and that Democrats are “rigging” elections by registering noncitizens to vote.  

The search, first launched by DHS last year at the explicit direction of the White House, has steadily increased with more workers and resources diverted from across the department to work on the effort. 

Homeland Security Investigations agents, who usually investigate major crimes like human trafficking, terrorism and child exploitation, were tasked with launching the effort last year. And more HSI agents have since been assigned in field offices across the country to sift through voter data and “amazingly large” spreadsheets that were handed over to agents with no clear explanation on how the lists were produced or where they came from, according to two former HSI officials with knowledge of the initiative. 

In February the “nationwide program to investigate allegations of voter fraud” expanded as HSI agents were directed to investigate and prosecute naturalized citizens who may have improperly voted in past elections, MS NOW reported at the time. 

The former HSI officials, who spoke to MS NOW on the condition of anonymity, given the sensitive nature of the information discussed, said that among the lists of thousands of individuals being handed to HSI agents to sift through, many are coming back as false positive, or “derived citizens” — people who have no documentation of citizenship because they automatically became citizens as children when their parents naturalized, or when they were adopted by U.S. citizens. Very few, if any, are rising to the level of investigations and even then, those probes do not mean that DHS has found criminality or is close to bringing charges.

The Pennsylvania secretary of state’s office told MS NOW that it has “not received any communications” from DHS agents “regarding intentions to conduct election — or voter fraud — related investigative activity in Pennsylvania.” State officials would not comment on whether they had received subpoenas. 

Connecticut also has yet to receive any communication from DHS about a possible voter fraud investigation, according to a senior election official in the state. 

According to a ProPublica investigation of data from the Department of Justice, between January 2025 and May 2026, 41 alleged non-itizen voters were charged for their involvement in unlawful voting practices or voting illegally. More than 150 million people voted in the 2024 presidential election and more than 112 million ballots were cast in the last midterm election. 

Still, noncitizen voting is extremely rare, even by the conservative Heritage Foundation’s accounting. And despite the president’s obsession with uncovering widespread noncitizen voter fraud, his administration has failed to produce evidence to back up its claims. 

The two former HSI officials, who spent decades at Homeland Security, said that HSI, the chief investigation arm, has “never” before been tasked with hunting for voter fraud on such a wide scale, not even in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attack. 

The DHS spokesperson claimed that since April 2025, “more than 24,000 cases have been identified by SAVE as potential non-U.S. citizens who were on voter rolls, and those cases have been referred to ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations for further investigation.” The SAVE database, which has been historically used for determining immigration benefits, has been repurposed by DHS to screen voters.  

DHS’ latest figure is significantly less than than the more than 250,000 “potential” noncitizens Trump and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said the department had identified on voter rolls across four states. 

“The end goal with this, as with every single thing the administration is doing, is to undermine the integrity of the upcoming elections, which it appears that his party might lose,” said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, which advises election officials across the country. 

Becker added that the administration intends “to sow doubt about the integrity of the system that we know is very secure and transparent.”

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From MS Now.